News Category: Desktop

There are many interesting features of the Linux directory structure. This month I cover some fascinating aspects of the /dev directory. Before you proceed any further with this article, I suggest that, if you have not already done so, you read my earlier articles, Everything is a file, and An...

Laptops preloaded with Linux aren't as rare as they used to be. In fact, big name hardware companies like Dell have whole lines of laptops that ship with Ubuntu installed, and if you want to stretch things a bit you could argue that a Chromebook is a kind of Linux machine (though it takes a bit of...

Do a web search for "Linux radio station", and the pickings are slim indeed, with most sites promoting instead ham radio software or streaming audio players, and a handful devoted to setting up a streaming web radio station—including one such optimistic article in Linux Journal some 15 years ago (...

This year at LinuxCon North America in Toronto, The Linux Foundation partnered with MakerKids and Kids on Computers to organize a day-long event focused on getting school-aged children interested in learning more about computer programming.

This year at LinuxCon North America in Toronto, The Linux Foundation partnered with MakerKids and Kids on Computers to organize a day-long event focused on getting school-aged children interested in learning more about computer programming. The Kids Day workshops included projects around Linux,...

To understand how the Internet became a medium for social life, you have to widen your view beyond networking technology and peer into the makeshift laboratories of microcomputer hobbyists of the 1970s and 1980s. That’s where many of the technical structures and cultural practices that we now...

I’m a big fan of the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion. One of the quotes from it that stands out in my head is, “Man fears the darkness, and so he scrapes away at the edges of it with fire.” For newcomers to the world of Linux, the black screen of the terminal can seem like a deep, foreboding...

Linux and Unix systems have long made it pretty easy to run a command on boot. Just add your command to /etc/rc.local and away you go. But as it turns out, running a command on shutdown is a little more complicated.
Why would you want to run a command as the computer shuts down? Perhaps you want to...

New to Linux? Learn the basic Linux commands with this cheat sheet
Linux is the flavor for programmers and wannabe hackers today as it is slowly and steadily being adopted for standalone PCs in addition to networked PCs. One of the basic reasons it is so popular among coders and hackers is its...

If you go out looking for PC benchmark results, there’s a very strong chance the tests won’t perfectly translate to performance under Linux, since they were likely run in Windows. This is particularly true if certain hardware has limited support in the Linux kernel. However, there are still plenty...

StormCrawler is an open source collection of reusable resources, mostly implemented in Java, for building low-latency, scalable web crawlers on Apache Storm. In his upcoming talk at ApacheCon, Julien Nioche, Director of DigitalPebble Ltd, will compare StormCrawler with similar projects, such as...